Archive for aprile 2012

If you watched the Magic and Storytelling video, you have probably noticed that Marco‘s face “magically” changes: as all computer vision nerds out there have already guessed, this was done using Jason Saragih’s awesome library. When the software for the performance was being written, this library had already been wrapped into a handy OpenFramworksaddon (thanks Kyle and Arturo), but there wasn’t an easy way to use it from VVVV, so we created FreeFrame facetracking plugin.
Today Joreg officially released the plugin to the public and was kind enough to credit me in the release post; so if you’re into win visual patching, go get it!

Magic and Storytelling is another awesome augmented reality / mixed media TED speech by Marco Tempest.
A few months ago I had a chat with Marco about an old multi layer AR demo: he needed something similar for a new performance, so I started to develop a platform that integrated HD cameras, depth cameras, skeleton tracking, face tracking and particle systems in a common pipeline. This prototype became the base for “Magic and Storytelling” and, more or less at the time I started writing the code for the Tesla piece, it was passed to the guys at onformative and checksum5 who ported into VVVV the relevant bits and created the final piece.
The TED video went online a few days ago and brought some internet love from different places, so here’s a link collection:
– this is the TED video
– this is a creativeapplication.net article
– this a wired article (I admit seeing my name written by Bruce Sterling made me drool…)
– this is the onformative project documentation (with lots of nice behind the scene material)
– this is the project documentation by checksum5
– this is a CDM article